SoftCom Corporate Blog

While the world is gearing up for the World Cup in South Africa, we’re getting excited to be participating in Kick-It!  Myhosting.com and Microsoft have partnered to raise money for a new Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 promotion that supports Right To Play—an organization focused on empowering children in developing countries through the power of sport and play. Your purchase will help support Football Development Programs.  

Right To Play uses the transformative power of sport and play to build essential skills in children—helping to drive social change in communities affected by war, poverty and disease. Through sport and play, children learn about team-work, cooperation and respect – the best values of sport. Right To Play creates a safe place for children to play, learn and thrive, helping them to realize a better future.  Right To Play programs target the most marginalized individuals including girls, persons with disabilities, children affected by HIV and AIDS, street children, former child combatants and refugees. These programs teach essential problem-solving, communication, and essential life skills that boost self esteem and help children resist negative peer pressure.

To make these programs a reality, Right to Play works with local Coaches—creating the foundation in communities for long-term support. With your purchase, you can help.

Between now and July 15, 2010, when you purchase Windows Server 2008 R2, myhosting.com is offering a  Kick-It special for 3 months of FREE service and Microsoft will donate to Right to Play. Buy today – and help give the power of play. 

 Learn more about Kick-It! www.kickitwithwindowsserver.com

 3 Month Promo Code: kickit3FREE

This past month, technology and new media enthusiasts around the world united in Austin Texas for South by South West Interactive (SXSWI). This year, Online Marketing’s Melissa Smich and Software Developer Ricky Lam were part of the myhosting.com team in attendance.

With the festival’s growing popularity, TechVibes posted a five-part blog series entitled Toronto at South by Southwest Interactive, featuring myhosting.com’s attendance in the second part. We invite you to check it out and leave a comment.

You can also check out some SXSW highlights on our blog.

Attending this year’s South By South West Interactive (SXSWI) conference, will be two SoftCom employees:  Software Developer, Ricky Lam, and our Community and Online Marketing Representative, Melissa Smich. Both will be a representing myhosting.com and will be documenting the conference activities via the myhosting blog and through the Twitter hashtag #myhostingsxsw.

If you will also be attending, please introduce yourself – we’d love to hear from you. If you can’t make it to the conference, be sure to read the blog coverage and follow our team and the hashtag.

About SXSW
The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery. Conference registrants also partake in a full agenda of provocative, informative panel discussions and celebrity interviews featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.

About the SXSWI (where our team will be)
An incubator of cutting-edge technologies, the SXSW Interactive Festival brings together the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators, content producers, programmers, widget inventors and new media entrepreneurs. Five days of captivating keynote presentations and provocative panel sessions provide hands-on training as well as big-picture analysis of the future of this industry.

Have any tips for where these two should go? Places to go? Sessions to attend? Food worth trying? Things you want covered on here?? Drop us a line and let us know!

Don’t forget to follow Ricky Lam and Melissa Smich on twitter with the #myhostingsxsw hash

For our SXSWI blog coverage, pictures, videos and other random maddness, click here.

For our official myhosting.com SXSW page and info, click here.

Every now and then, interesting messages, stories and comments come by our mail2web.com dedicated support team. Last week was no different as support team member, Chris H, received an interesting message from a client in Haiti. This client explained that he was providing aide to earthquake victims, and was using mail2web.com to help get the job done.

“I have passed it [mail2web] on to our teams in country so you guys have played a very key role in the earthquake relief effort. I would say 90% of the customs paperwork, flight manifests and flight plans have gone out through your servers. It hasn’t lost a message yet.”

Wow.  Our employees were deeply affected by the note and the response was the same across the board: how can we help out? So, we decided to set up some fundraising for employees, stakeholders, clients and, well, anyone who wants to help out and show their support.

We set up a page where anyone who’s interested can make donations through FirstGiving.com – a 3rd party online charitable fundraising site. All funds raised go directly to Doctors Without Borders. Donating through this site is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to make a contribution to our fundraising efforts.

Please visit the page and show your support today.

http://www.firstgiving.com/softcom-haiti-relief

Many thanks for your support– and don’t forget to forward this to anyone who you think might want to donate too!

This past month, OpenSRS celebrated its 10th anniversary. The company’s CEO, Elliot Noss, released this open letter, which was sent to all of their resellers and added to their blog.

In the letter, he recalls their history, “Back in the spring and summer of 1999, we started planning for a different way to sell domain names… We knew that domain names should be simple and inexpensive to sell, and were made much too difficult and expensive by the monopoly provider. We were confident that we could fix that.”

“Now ten years later, and we still have our very first customer still happily and actively selling domains through OpenSRS. The first domain we sold is still managed by OpenSRS. And we’ve grown every single year.”

When SoftCom was founded in 1997, there weren’t a lot of options available in the domain registration department. We partnered with  OpenSRS soon after their launch due to their highly automated platform, reseller-only focus, and geographic proximity to us. This was a great decision and we’ve enjoyed a successful and  strong relationship with them the past 9 years.

SoftCom’s Chief Financial Officer Michael Carr says, “OpenSRS has allowed us to focus on our core business of web and application hosting and not have to worry about provisioning domains for our customers. OpenSRS is highly automated and responsive and offers a variety of gTLDs and ccTLDs that our customers look for and expect from a hosting provider.”

As OpenSRS resellers and solution partners for 9 years, we would like to take this opportunity to congratulate them on this milestone. We would like to thank OpenSRS for their many years of valued service and we look forward to many more years with them as solutions partners.

How do you think OpenSRS has changed/improved the web industry? Are you also a reseller? We’d love to hear from you!

Seasons Greetings:

At this festive time of year I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year.

As the Winter Solstice, the longest night, approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere the days once again promise to grow longer. With the endless cycles of dark and light, decay and renewal, I am reminded that there is always hope and our dreams to guide us.

From all us here at SoftCom, thanks for your continued support and we hope you have a bright and happy New Year.

At SoftCom, when we don’t do web hosting or email hosting, we hang out with former presidents. No, not kidding. On May 29^th, 2009, we just did that.

Power Within Inc., also a Toronto based company, is an organizer of educational, motivational and leadership events. We have been working closely with Power Within for a couple of years on different events they have organized and have always been very happy with their customer service and organizational skills.

Power Within had a very important event on May 29th, 2009. For the first time ever, they managed to put two former presidents, President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton on stage for an “almost” informal conversation. Considering their drastically different backgrounds, affiliations and tenure, everybody was expecting a partisan, post-presidential debate. We were disappointed since the conversation was very cordial and friendly. Maybe too friendly that, President George W. Bush at one point called President Bill Clinton “brother”. The event received wide spread media coverage. Here are some links to the coverage of this event by Huffington Post and Time.

As SoftCom, thanks to our close relationship with Power Within, we got a couple of invitations which included a brief moment with both of the Presidents, a photo opportunity and a front row seat to the public event.

Here are our photos, Chief Operating Officer Kaan Bora Soran, Chief Marketing Officer Celal Ulgen and Chief Financial Officer Michael Carr with President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush.

Kaan Bora Soran's Photo with President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush

Celal Ulgen's Photo with President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush

Michael Carr's Photo with President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush

Up until January 20^th, 2009, the day President Barack Obama took office, for the last 16 years, these gentlemen were the most powerful people on the planet. Yet, during the ceremony, both of the Presidents were very friendly, courteous and humble. I suppose this attitude put a smile on all of our faces.

Friends, colleagues and family keep asking us what we have wished for when we were sandwiched between two Presidents. Of course, we wished for world peace, and, an end to global warming and more success to SoftCom. What would you wish for?

Once again, we would like to thank SoftCom, Power Within and Joseph Khoja from Power Within for providing this great opportunity with the Presidents. We hope to soon blog from the Vatican in similar fashion when we meet the Pope.

Kaan, Celal and Michael

It has been 100 days since I’ve taken over as CEO of SoftCom so I thought I’d give you a quick overview of my first hundred days at the helm. Before I take you through the highlights of the past few months, I’d like to say a few words about the genesis of SoftCom and how the name came about, as I get asked this question quite often.

It was 12 years ago that we embarked on this journey; a few friends from high school with a big dream. We were young, ambitious and ready to do whatever it took to succeed. However we were not quite sure exactly where to start. After a few days of discussions, a decision was reached. We were going to try our hand at web hosting, which was relatively new back then. It was meant to be one of the several technology services our founding group was going to pursue. With that decision behind us, we moved on to the next challenge, finding a name for our business. After some deliberation, the name SoftCom Technology Consulting emerged as the front runner, and was subsequently chosen as the name of the company. Collectively, we thought the name SoftCom was a good fit as it was the name of the computer club, which was instrumental in building our passion for technology. The “Technology Consulting” part was added to reflect our intention to offer an array of technology services.

As the business evolved, we realized providing web hosting services was our passion and that’s where we wanted to concentrate our efforts. At times, we felt our company name did not accurately reflect this and debated dropping the “Technology Consulting”, as well as acquiring a matching domain name. For one reason or another, the decision was always put off until later. That is, until last week. As of June 8, 2009, SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. is no more. We have renamed the business as “SoftCom Inc.” and moved the web site to its new home at http://softcom.com.

The first order of business for us as we entered a new chapter in the history of SoftCom was to review our purpose and values. This was an arduous process but a necessary one to communicate the right message to our customers, partners and employees. I invite you to visit our “About Us” page to read about our Purpose & Values, and welcome any questions or comments you may have.

The next challenge for me was to fill the role I have long occupied as the head of Technology at SoftCom. I am very pleased to say we were lucky to find a perfect replacement in Mark Salerno, who is an industry veteran with 10+ years of experience in the web hosting space. Mark has most recently worked at Network Solutions as VP, Research and Development. He brings a wealth of subject matter expertise as well as years of executive management experience to SoftCom.

In addition to hiring Mark, we have brought on board Celal Ulgen as our Chief Marketing Officer. Celal is no stranger to SoftCom. As a matter of fact, he was one of SoftCom’s co-founders and we are thrilled to have him back. During his extended hiatus from SoftCom, Celal was quite busy making a name for himself as a marketer in the web hosting industry. Most recently he was involved in the Venture Capital markets focusing on infrastructure, e-commerce, and web services investments.

On the new development front, we have accomplished a number of different things. Just to name a few, we have launched mail2web.com Community Portal, wrapped up mail2web Live Exchange 2007 migrations and upgraded myhosting.com infrastructure. Many more exciting developments are in the pipeline, such as the impending mail2web.com re-launch slated for later this week and the long awaited control panel overhaul ready to kick-off in just a few weeks. We hope you will like the new mail2web.com design and would be generous to us with your constructive feedback. Please share your thoughts with us on the forums… We are listening.

As our journey continues, I will continue to write on this blog and bring you updates on the progress we are making as the new SoftCom, literally and figuratively. Stay tuned!

Thank You,

Turker Sokullu
CEO
SoftCom Inc.

Good day,

I wanted to take the time to inform you, as a valued customer of SoftCom, of some recent changes in our management. Tony Yustein has,  effective immediately,  resigned as President and Chief Executive Officer of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. We wish Tony success in his future endeavors.

Co-founder and former Vice President of Operations and Software Development, Turker Sokullu has been appointed as a director and the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Secretary of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. Firat Eren has also been appointed as a director and the Chairman.

These changes in management  will not affect the day-to-day operations of our company. We will continue to provide the same quality and service you have come to expect from SoftCom and look forward to the future with hope as we continue to work for our valued customers.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Seasons Greetings,

At this festive time of year I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year. As the Winter Solstice, the longest night, approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere the days once again promise to grow longer. With the endless cycles of dark and light, decay and renewal, I am reminded that there is always hope and our dreams to guide us.

I am also reminded of the Irish blessing;

“May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been the foresight to know where you’re going and may you always find a light to guide you home.”

From all us here at SoftCom thanks for your continued support and we hope you have a bright and happy New Year.

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.